


Like Ashes

by Labradoodles_and_Muffins



Series: A Dancer, a Liar, and a Murderer (are all the same) [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-08-22
Packaged: 2017-12-24 07:09:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Labradoodles_and_Muffins/pseuds/Labradoodles_and_Muffins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she’s five she burns her first attempt at making bread.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Ashes

When she’s five she burns her first attempt at making bread. It’s an early indicator of her inability to cook and her mother smiles kindly and offers to get rid of it while she tries again. Stubbornness makes her eat it anyway. It tastes like ashes and she smiles because it’s hers and she made it.

She’s young the first time she kills, perhaps too young (eleven and her mother never fully forgives her brother). It changes something inside her. Where she once wanted to keep everything safe and whole, she changes. She starts to think with a practicality out of place on a child. She sees things with a realism that makes her mothers eyes look sad. She starts to think about what the best route for the most people is, instead of what route might make everyone happy. They eat the dreamhare she killed for dinner and the taste is of a brothers pride and a mothers tears and, just a little, of foreboding.

At fourteen she eats stolen, stale food first time. It’s two weeks since her parents died and people’s sympathy has begun to run dry so she saves the good food for the others. She’s packed away her misery and anguish because people need her and she still remembers what the dreamhare taught her. She stuffs the bread into her mouth furiously, it’s the first thing she’s had in days, and it tastes like mold and a dead childhood and old warnings brought to fruition.

Sixteen and she’s on a journey. She doesn’t know where this road will lead or what they’ll find when they get there and it’s a strange mix of exhilaration and fear. She didn’t even want to be dragged into this but she’s here now and she won’t, can’t, walk away. People are counting on them, this rag tag bunch of strangers forced together by circumstance. She sits by the fire and chews thoughtfully on a bun that tastes like the beginnings of friendship and hope.

At seventeen she regains two friends thought lost and then loses a new one. It…cracks something in her and she cries into a bowl of indistinguishable mush. She can’t taste the tears because the loss is too strong.

She’s nineteen the first time she sets foot in Balfonheim purely because she wants to. Over the course of a month she’s robbed of her shoes, conned out of most of her gil and ready to give up. Then she kills a man. Not because he wanted to destroy a nation but simply because he thought he could take from her what was not his to take. She supposes they’re pretty much the same thing - some try to take her home, some her freedom, but they all meet the same end. She burns the body and moves to a new tavern, where she dines on stew and finds that it tastes bitter and sharp and a refusal to bow.

When she’s twenty-one she looks in a mirror and doesn’t recognise the face looking back at her. She spends so long staring at the stranger, trying to figure out who this woman with the old eyes in a young face is, that she burns her bread. She eats it any way because she always was stubborn. It tastes like ashes and she cries because she’s a dead soul in the skin of a stranger.


End file.
